I. Field
The present invention relates generally to wireless communications, and more specifically to flexible network architecture.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established via a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-signal-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
There is generally pressure to simplify network architectures and go towards one-node configurations, especially for userplane handling. However, in roaming cases both a visited network and a home network must be able to process the user data (for policy control, counting for charging, lawful intercept, filtering, etc.). This leads to an architecture where there is one userplane node in the visited network and another one in the home network. In non-roaming cases these two nodes are still present and their functions are overlapping. Moreover, interfaces from the remaining of the system to these two user plane nodes have to be created, causing double amount of interfaces with very similar characteristics. There is therefore a need for simplification of this network architecture.